Tag Archives: Hemiballism

[Excerpted from “Young and Hemiballismic: Your Life as I see It” by Fellipe Zombacaliptico]

“Chapter 237. Thus it was such that the day after Labor Day in 1995 you attended your first day of Grade school. You awoke that morning to the chimes of your brand new alarm clock, the repetitive, cacophonous, screeching high D thrusting you awake from your pleasant dreams, dreams that in that gentle and innocent epoch of your life tended to center around the gift of flight (although you could never tell in these dreams if you weren’t just falling from a great height), simple, serene, the sensation of wind in your face only the more wondrous in reflection once brutally interrupted by this dying-cat alarm of yours, an alarm clock that would wrest you from idyllic fancies of slumber but also save you from the uncanny and disturbing nightmares of your ever more tumultuous subconscious, beginning on this day, for the rest of your childhood through college; this particular note, an unturned and garrulous D two octaves above middle C, forever associated in your mind with that gap between awake and asleep, a limbo of consciousness, defibrillating you back to the phenomenological world, leaving you with the unsettling feeling that you’d died in your sleep a second before your were to awaken.

How nervous you were! Standing in lines in front of the simple piece of blue paper, the roll for your class that year, hoping that your new best friend, Nick C, easily confused with Nick D but never with Nick B, was in your class (he wasn’t; he was in Ms Knowles class); again, these new feelings of unease bubbling up within you, as though behind the doors to Banbury Heights Elementary School was some vast conspiratorial cabal of evil men who intended to enslave you or sell you to aliens. Yet, there you were: the first day of the next 16 years of your life, no?”